The school bus has a more profound impact on education than most realize. (Photo by Shutterstock)

A stranger watching children file out of San Francisco’s Rooftop School when the bell peals each afternoon might look around for a time machine. Down the left side of the driveway walks a group of children slated for “parent pickup” while down the right a teacher leads a line of almost exclusively African American and Latino kids toward buses. It would all have a Little Rock Nine sort of feel, but for the absence of national guardsmen and the laughing salutations exchanged across the space. That this is San Francisco Unified School District’s transportation success story helps explain why some are calling for change.

More than 25 million children, over 55% of U.S. public K-12 students, climb aboard school buses each day, according to “Beyond the Yellow Bus,” a 2014 report from the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California, Berkeley. But in many places, “a lot of transportation … has been cut over the last ten years,” says San Francisco Board of Education Member Matt Haney. In his city, fewer than 10% of public elementary students now ride school buses, with ridership among non-special education students decreasing from 3300 to 1700 between 2011 and 2017, and schools served for these kids falling from 58 to 33. As a result, even though San Francisco offers citywide school choice—allowing all students to apply to any of its 100-plus public elementary programs—many schools are in reality accessible only to those who live within walking distance or whose parents have the time and money to drive.

The link between limited school transportation and decreased school choice is neither conjecture nor specific to San Francisco. A 2009 report out of the University of Washington demonstrated with a survey of parents in Denver and Washington, D.C. that “transportation is indeed a barrier to choice.” Lots of parents told researchers they would have chosen a different school if better transportation options had been available, but the following groups were particularly likely to say so: “lower-income parents, minority parents, single parents, parents with less education and parents in Spanish-speaking households.” It’s not just because these caregivers often have less access to reliable cars, but also that schools considered “good” tend to be located in higher-income areas. In other words, low-income students generally have farther to go and less capacity to get there. Some refer to this phenomenon as the “geographic opportunity gap.”

One obvious solution is using public transit, but that can be difficult, in part because of the way buses are controlled. Some school buses are owned and operated by school districts, but a large chunk of yellow bus service (72% in Pennsylvania as of 2012) is contracted out, much of it to national and international companies. The lobbying power of these for-profit enterprises is significant, and the Federal Transit Administration enforces a “tripper rule” prohibiting transit agencies that receive federal funding (which is almost all of them) from operating public bus service “in competition with private school bus operators.” Most localities work around the rule by having public bus routes happen to run past schools and sending extra buses around start and release times, but doing so requires inter-agency cooperation and sometimes controversy.

What’s more, many families can’t afford two tickets a day, and even when cities waive those charges through programs like YouthPass in Portland, Oregon, “the other big thing,” says Todd Ely, director of the Center for Local Government Research and Training at the University of Colorado, Denver, “is just age. So for high schoolers it totally makes sense … but elementary-aged kids [aren’t] going to ride a city bus by themselves.”

More fundamentally, both traditional school busing and public transit are what’s known as “fixed-route transportation” and therefore require making several stops along an indirect path (or a hub-and-spoke arrangement where kids ride to a central point and then out in a different direction). This design translates to long swaths of time spent sitting, something a country grappling with an obesity epidemic can ill afford. The time isn’t just sedentary but also often wasted, managed in triage fashion with drivers struggling to prevent bullying and antics like slithering out the windows. (A pamphlet from the American Federation of Teachers on managing bus time features tips like “never put a student off your bus” and “never use profanity.”)

It’s not uncommon for rural and urban children to spend more than two hours a day on the bus while their counterparts who can walk or be chauffeured to school attend dance class or SAT prep. This “hidden curriculum” has been associated with the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers, and it also includes clubs, internships and relationship-building with teachers and administrators. Members of San Francisco’s African American Parent Advisory Council told school board members in March of 2017 that being “shipped across town” to a better school also means higher truancy rates (because running a few minutes late translates to a missed day) and having to wake up earlier than other kids.

Transportation limitations can also hamstring innovations meant to extend the number of hours a day students get support from their schools and teachers as well. Ely explained that cash-strapped districts rely on a “tiered” approach where school start and release times are staggered so the same fleet of buses can serve multiple schools. That makes it difficult for schools to dabble in big ideas like longer days and year-round schooling, as well as for all kids to benefit from sports teams, clubs and after-school tutoring.

Back at Rooftop, the students who depend on the 1:50 p.m. bus to get home haven’t been able to access their school’s acclaimed Children’s After School Arts program, leaving it disproportionately (though by no means exclusively) white and affluent. Parents have requested a late bus to no avail. They’ve also complained for years about the timing of morning buses, known to arrive as late as 25 minutes after classes begin. Christina Feliciana, whose two African American daughters ride the bus most mornings, started a petition back in 2014 using the slogan “#Bustice.” The tardiness of the bus, she and more than 100 others informed the school district, “affects students of color who arrive to school late, miss the morning community-building routines and often parts of language arts,” exacerbating the achievement gap. “It also impacts their classmates who have to wait for late kids to be oriented to the activity, and it distracts our teachers from their lesson plans.”

The district moved pickup times earlier in 2014, but morning buses continued to arrive late for years. Feliciana has seen considerable improvement over the last few months, but the bus still rarely arrives in time for children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals to finish their breakfast in the cafeteria before class begins, and kids just can’t be asked to board a bus earlier than the current 6:55 a.m. first pickup.

My qualifications are cobbled together from a series of past lives, including stay-at-home mother (of three), commercial litigator and higher ed lawyer (at the Boston firm formerly known as Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge), English teacher (Crossland High School), federa...